150 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonin the allegory of gossip: the Prince had gotten legally married to
Caroline of Brunswick just the year before, and within a year had
separated from her. Just a few weeks previous to Boaden’s puff, in his
New Brighton Guide, John Williams had attacked Robinson while
defending the Prince of Wales in the aftermath of his separation from
his wife, Caroline, presuming the forthcoming Sappho and Phaon to
be an unflattering roman à clef. Writing as “Anthony Pasquin,” his
long- standing pseudonym, Williams finds it incredulous that “Mrs.
Robinson, or the Perdita, or the lame Sappho, or what you will,
would in the moment that she is receiving an annuity of five hun-
dred pounds from the bounty of the Prince, unite in the interested
cabal who labor to tarnish his good name” (53).^21 Given the fact
that Robinson’s annuity and the reason she received it was public
knowledge, Boaden was sensitive to how easy it was for detractors to
undermine his friend’s poetic ambitions. Two days before the above
puff, in a column headed “The British Sapho,” Boaden promoted
the forthcoming publication of Sappho and Phaon but with some
admitted anxiety that Robinson’s assertion of her sonnets as “legiti-
mate” was surely going to provoke bawdy and malicious jokes at
Robinson’s expense (15 October 1796). Soon the public would learn
that Tarleton, too, had discarded “poor Perdita”—but not before
malicious reports in the Evening Mail and the Times suggested that
he was enjoying the sexual favors of both “the ‘Perdita’ and her fair
daughter” (11, 13 October 1797). Sure enough, once Tarleton had
abandoned Robinson for the much younger Susan Bertie, the public
identification of Robinson with Sappho became problematic once
more as the sequence came to epitomize Robinson’s personal life yet
again. Almost two years after the publication of Sappho and Phaon,
the Times could not resist invoking the sequence in order to embar-
rass Robinson and gratuitously to humiliate her daughter:General TARLETON has been very much surprised at the title of legiti-
mate Sonnets given by the Modern Sappho to her new poetical rhap-
sodies. The General aptly observed, that he never knew her to favour
her friends or the Public with any productions of that nature before.
(24 July 1798)Such a comment, which is not really about her poetry, reveals the
continued difficulty she had with decoupling her poetic self from her
former infamy.
Poetic forms have semantic resonances that make statements inde-
pendent of a poem’s vocabulary. Recognizing Shelley’s “Ode to the9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1509780230100251_05_ch03.indd 150 12/28/2010 11:08:43 AM12/28/2010 11:08:43 AM
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